After announcing the L.A. FOR L.A. campaign on Monday encouraging business leaders and philanthropic organizations to buy buildings for the unhoused -- Mayor Bass called the old policies addressing homelessness cruel during her fireside chat at UCLA on Wednesday morning.
Karen Bass: We need to advocate for people to be off the street and housed, not advocate for them to stay on the street. And then I think that our policy, even though what was not an explicit policy, it really was you stay on the street until we build you a building. And that’s cruel.
When asked about how equity in terms of economic opportunity will be maintained as the L.A. 2028 Olympics get closer, her main message was to stay active.
Bass: It’s great to have the rhetoric of equity, but you really have to fight for it ... making sure that when RFPs are written, they’re written in ways that don’t exclude folks making sure that you’re doing targeted proactive outreach, and not just putting it up on your website. So I think it means being very, very active.
Mayor Bass says she hopes to use other big events like the World Cup, the US women’s open in golf and the super bowl as catalysts, especially in the private sector.
Bass: One of the main reasons we got the Olympics is because we didn’t need to build any big stadium. So we don’t need to do that. Can’t we build housing? Can’t we do that?”
As homelessness remains a problem, Mayor Bass continues to believe that housing and healthcare should be “basic human rights.”
For Annenberg Media, I’m James Bao.